Fast Ice Read online

  Rudi nodded. “Which means there’s no one on board to use that electricity or there’s no working equipment to do anything with it.”

  Kurt was less downhearted. Electricity meant heat and heat meant life. “Do we have any ships in the area?”

  “The Providence is the nearest vessel,” Rudi said. “She’s a Class 1 survey ship studying deepwater currents. She’s currently about fifteen hundred miles away. Close enough that she could be within helicopter range by the time you two get there.”

  Kurt stood up. He knew the drill. There would be a plane waiting for him and Joe at Dulles International. “We’ll grab our things.”

  Rudi stopped him. “I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye on Cora, but she was one of ours.”

  Kurt felt the same way. “I’ll bring her home if I can.”

  “And if you can’t,” Rudi added, “then I want to know what happened to her. And who was responsible.”

  5

  BASE ZERO

  HOLTZMAN GLACIER, QUEEN MAUD LAND, ANTARCTICA

  A series of small buildings lay half buried in the snow at the edge of the Holtzman Glacier. Painted a dull white, with mushroom-shaped roofs, they linked to one another and blended in with their surroundings, appearing almost invisible from overhead. The only real indication that a settlement existed in the area came from the trenches in the snow linking the habitat to structures out and away from the central hub.

  The trenches hadn’t always been necessary, but ten feet of snow had built up around the outpost in the months since it was set up. Ironically, the piles were not a result of storms dumping frozen precipitation from the sky. The air over Antarctica was so dry that it actually snowed very little there, no more than five inches per year at this location. But because the temperatures remained frigid year-round, what did fall never melted. Instead, it piled up, blowing about in endless drifts.

  As strong winds swept across the continent, they scoured the landscape like currents in the ocean. Certain areas were laid bare, offering oasis-like spots of raw land. Others received the excess, with drifts piling higher and higher until anything on the surface was buried, entombed and forgotten.

  Base Zero sat in one of those areas and would have a short lifetime on the surface. It had survived the Antarctic summer but would be lost by the end of winter, hidden by the blowing snowdrifts. The men and women who’d put the base together knew this all too well. In fact, they were counting on it.

  Unlike the international scientists who had constructed their buildings on platforms that could be raised up each winter or spring, the builders of Base Zero fully intended their habitat to vanish and never be found.

  And while most of them would be happy to say good-bye to the cramped little outpost, a lean figure whose subordinates called her the Ice Queen would be sad to see it go.

  Where else could I find such silence? Such pristine air and calming solitude?

  Leaving this place meant going back to a crowded, dusty world. One that would grow worse with every passing day unless someone altered the trajectory.

  She left the main building and entered a trench that led from the habitat across to the nearby glacier. With goggles to protect her eyes, a heavy scarf wrapped around her face and a thick, multilayered cap covering her head and ears, she looked as if she belonged in Aspen or St. Moritz. All that could be seen of her was the tip of her pointed nose and a few wisps of blond hair poking out from beneath the hat.

  Arriving at a Y-shaped junction, she branched to the left. The path began sloping upward until it let her out in the middle of the frozen plain.

  The snow around her was glistening under the noontime sun. Scalloped drifts ran off in every direction, while mountainous terrain could be seen in the distance beyond. Twelve hundred miles past that mountain lay the southern geographic pole, the very bottom of the world. Fortunately, her destination was much closer—a small drilling rig painted white and shielded by canvas tarps to disguise it from prying eyes. She walked toward it, stopping only when her satellite phone buzzed.

  Reaching under the hem of her coat, she grasped the phone with her gloved hand and slid it from its holster. A code indicated the caller’s identification, but checking it was just a formality. There was only one person who would be contacting her.

  Pulling the scarf away from her mouth, she answered. “Your call is early. I’m not due to report until this afternoon.”

  “My call is early,” a male voice insisted, “because problems don’t arrive on a schedule.”

  “You’re saying we have a problem?”

  “We do,” he said. “Or we will. Very soon.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about your friend Cora and her old associates in NUMA,” the voice said bluntly. “I warned you about her. I told you she would never become one of us.”

  The blond woman shook her head. “We needed Cora. She led us to what we were after. And I alerted you the moment she betrayed us by contacting NUMA. Now she’s dead. And I’ve seen nothing to suggest NUMA tried to respond to her message.”

  “What you haven’t seen I have,” the man insisted. “One of their ships has made a sudden change of course. After weeks of leisurely operations in South African waters, it’s now plowing through the sea at high speed, heading almost due south.”

  This was not good news. “Is it coming our way?”

  “No.”

  “Then we have nothing to worry about.”

  “How I wish that were true,” he said. “I’ve extrapolated their course and discovered their destination. They’re heading for the Grishka.”

  “Impossible,” she replied. “That ship is at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Yet again,” he said. “How I wish the facts matched your confident assertions. You sent the Grishka on a westward course, did you not?”

  “Away from us,” she said. “We wanted to make sure it was farther from the bay and our area of operations when it went down. Just in case an emergency beacon we hadn’t accounted for went off. That way, if anyone came looking for it, they would be out beyond the horizon.”

  “It certainly went beyond the horizon,” he snapped. “At least five hundred miles beyond. But it’s still afloat. Drifting and collecting ice. I’ve seen the images with my own eyes.”

  She couldn’t imagine how that was true, but there was no point in arguing. “What do you want us to do?”

  “The Americans are obviously headed there to investigate and perhaps salvage the ship. We need to be certain they fail. Where’s the tactical team?”

  “They’re still on the Goliath,” she said. “Which is too slow and too far away to get there in time.”

  “Then you’ll have to do it,” he said. “Use the Blunt Nose.”

  “That vessel is being readied to bring you our genetically engineered samples,” she said. “If you divert it, the samples will be delayed. Perhaps even damaged.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Which is more important?” he asked finally. “Speed or stealth?”

  “Secrecy above all,” she replied. “But don’t forget, the Blunt Nose is unarmed.”

  “I’m not expecting a running battle,” he replied. “The Grishka is a derelict at this point. Listing and adrift. It won’t take much to send it to the bottom once and for all. Since you failed the first time, I want you to finish the job. By my calculations, you should be able to beat them to the ship by several hours. Secrecy will be maintained and any clues you left behind will vanish forever.”

  She bit her lip and held back from firing off another salvo. “And the samples?”

  “You can deliver them after you’ve taken care of the Grishka.”

  The call ended before she could argue the point further. The discussion was over. So be it.

  She put the phone away, she would have to leave almost immediately,
but she needed to check one last thing. She moved forward and ducked under the tarp. A wave of heat swept over her as she entered the operations area. Heat and humidity.

  An older man with a wrench in his hand walked over to her. He was short in height but broad across the shoulders. He had hands like the paws of a bear. Even the oversize wrench looked like a toy in his powerful grip.

  Scars on his face and neck stood out. They came from an explosion while working at an oil field in Venezuela years earlier. He’d been given the most basic of care, denied any financial settlement and then left for dead. Until the Ice Queen found him.

  Now he was one of them. A zealot who’d had the veil lifted from his eyes. Like the rest of them, he saw the dying world for what it was—a disgusting and polluted place where humans tore one another apart and burned nature to the ground for incremental scraps of imaginary wealth. Like her and the others, he was ready to change that for good.

  “Do you feel that?” he said.

  Of course she felt it. “Is something wrong with the drilling rig?”

  “Nothing wrong with it at all,” he replied. “It’s shut down because we don’t need it anymore.”

  “Then where’s all this heat coming from?”

  “We’ve broken through and tapped the geothermal layer,” he said, offering a smile that stretched the scars painfully. “We capped the well, but it’s bringing up so much superheated steam that I’ve had to vent some of it. Otherwise, the pressure will get too high.”

  “You’ve hit the target right in the heart,” she said. “Outstanding. What’s the depth?”

  “Two thousand meters,” he said. “Roughly six thousand feet.”

  There was only one pertinent question. “Will the pressure hold?”

  The foreman nodded. “Trust me,” he said. “There’s more heat down there than your wildest estimates. You’ll have all the power and steam that you could ever need.”

  A smile appeared on her face. Something the workers seldom saw. It made her look kind instead of harsh, attractive instead of someone to be feared. She banished it quickly. “Stay on top of this. We’re two months past the solstice. The days are getting shorter. This place will be uninhabitable in a matter of weeks.”

  “It’s going to be a long, dark winter,” he said.

  She nodded. “Longer and darker than anyone knows.”

  6

  NUMA JAYHAWK HELICOPTER

  FIFTY-NINE DEGREES SOUTH LATITUDE

  After a long flight from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town and a four-hour ride out to the Providence, Kurt and Joe got three hours’ rest before climbing back on board the NUMA Jayhawk helicopter and flying off toward the Grishka.

  At that point, the stricken ship was still more than five hundred miles away. Even fitted with extra fuel tanks, the helicopter would have little time to hover over the Grishka before it had to turn for home.

  “We’ve got a slight tailwind,” the pilot told Kurt and Joe, “but that’s going to be a headwind on our way back.”

  “You won’t have to hang around long,” Kurt said. “Just get us on the deck.”

  The pilot nodded and Kurt sat back. He and Joe were in the passenger section of the helicopter, their minds and bodies completing a rapid adjustment from the normal day-to-day operations back in D.C. to the intense environment of a critical field operation.

  “By my calculations, we’ll be there in two hours,” Joe said. “Just enough time for me to pry the truth out of you.”

  “What truth?” Kurt said.

  “The truth about Cora.”

  Kurt shook his head in surprise. “Sixteen hours from D.C. to Cape Town and you decide to pester me now?”

  “I was plotting my strategy,” Joe said.

  “On the back of your eyelids.”

  “Best way to make a long flight seem short,” Joe said. “Besides, you know how these things go. Once we get rolling, sleep will be at a premium.”

  Joe wasn’t wrong about that. But Kurt had found sleep hard to come by. On the flight out, he’d drifted off several times, only to be woken by memories of Cora and questions about what she’d been up to. Each string of thoughts led to the dark possibility of what they’d find on the ship.

  The little they’d been able to discover regarding Cora’s expedition showed it to be funded by questionable sources and steeped in mystery generally. And whatever part of Antarctica they’d eventually made landfall on, she’d gone there without getting permission from the UN or any of the national agencies that handled that sort of thing. It was a long fall from being part of NUMA.

  Joe was waiting. “I can be very persistent,” he said.

  “The word you’re looking for is annoying.”

  “That, too,” Joe said. “So, give me the scoop. What’s the real deal?”

  Kurt gave in with a sigh. Two hours of being pestered by one’s best friend was more than any man could endure.

  “Cora was everything Rudi said she was. And by that I mean she was brilliant, hardworking and a handful. Rudi handpicked her to be the next member of the team. He brought her in under a mentorship program, like the one they run at Annapolis. And like that program, the duty falls to the mentor to make sure the protégée succeeds. Unfortunately, the more Cora acted out, the more Rudi came down on her. Every reprimand crushed her spirit just a little bit more. And that spirit was what made her great. The bottom line was simple. Cora was like a horse you have to whisper to. Rudi wanted to break her and build her back up his own way. I opened the barn door and set her free.”

  Joe nodded. He understood the tension better. “I wish I’d had a chance to meet her,” he said, then, realizing how he’d phrased it, added, “I mean, um, maybe I still can.”

  “It’s okay,” Kurt said. “But for the record, you two would have gotten along famously. Together, you’d have driven Rudi to early retirement.”

  As Joe laughed, Kurt wondered if he should have done more to make Cora stay. It was a question without an answer. But one he’d asked himself a hundred times in the past twenty-four hours.

  “Do you think she was happy after she left?”

  “I think she was relieved,” Kurt said. “No more structure to fit into. No more chain of command, with her at the bottom. No more fighting. She wanted to change the world. Kind of hard to do that from a desk in the basement.”

  “You think she reached out to Rudi to let him know she’d made good?”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Kurt said.

  Joe nodded and then looked off in the other direction. He’d pried enough info out of his friend.

  Kurt leaned back and tried to get some rest, but sleep remained hard to come by. He wondered why Cora hadn’t contacted him. He would have dropped everything to go help her if she’d reached out. She had to have known that. And yet the call hadn’t come.

  The next two hours passed slowly. Kurt tried to rest for some of it yet found himself checking his watch and counting the minutes until they’d arrive over the stricken ship.

  “Coming up on the wreck,” the pilot announced eventually. “Two miles out. Slowing and descending.”

  As the helicopter closed in on the ship, it shed altitude and speed, giving Kurt and Joe a clear view of what lay ahead. The ship looked like an ice sculpture, every surface covered in frost from the ocean’s spray.

  “She’s low in the water,” Joe said. “And definitely listing to starboard.”

  The pilot’s voice came next. “Do you have a preference for how we approach the ship? Or where I set you down?”

  Ideally, they’d have used the ship’s landing pad, but the Grishka’s own helicopter was still on board, chained to the deck like a dragon frozen in ice.

  “Circle the ship once,” Kurt said. “Check the wind and then take us out over the stern. Joe and I will rappel down to the deck.”

  T
he pilot did as ordered, swinging wide and descending to a hundred feet.

  As the helicopter circled, Kurt and Joe got ready for the egress. Voice-activated headsets were pulled on. Metal-studded climbing shoes, like those Kurt had worn on the frozen Potomac, were strapped to their feet. Backpacks filled with medical supplies and high-calorie liquid supplements were readied, just in case they found anyone alive down there.

  With everything else set, they pulled on tight-fitting thermal coats, which NUMA called expedition jackets. Lightweight and well-insulated, they were heated by battery-powered coils and armored with rigid, puncture-resistant Kevlar panels. While the panels weren’t bulletproof, they would stop a knife or the sharp point of a protruding bit of wreckage.

  Built-in tracking beacons were integrated into the jackets, while twin sets of LED lights, secured where the breast pockets would have been, could be switched on with the touch of a button on the collar. The lights were angled slightly downward and designed to illuminate the darkest of problems while keeping a man or woman’s hands free to work on whatever issue they found.

  After checking their gear, Kurt gave the thumbs-up, pulled a harness around his body and attached it to a cable that hung by the helicopter’s door.

  Joe did the same, moving carefully into position.

  “You have your wetsuit on underneath those togs?” Kurt asked.

  “Of course,” Joe said. “Think we’ll be going for a swim?”

  Kurt grabbed the rappelling cable and prepared to throw it out the door behind him. “We’re supposed to find out what happened to this ship. If the problem is below the waterline, one of us is going to get wet.”

  Joe had no doubt already predicted that. “Sounds like a job for the Director of Special Projects.”

  “Unless he delegates it to his trusty assistant,” Kurt replied.

  By now, they’d come around the far side of the Grishka. That brought an odd sight into view.

  “Look at that,” Joe said.

  Kurt finished adjusting his harness and glanced at the ship. Impact damage could be seen all along the port side of the vessel, while a wedge of ice extended outward from the hull. The ice grew along the side of the vessel, sweeping back toward the stern like a wing.